Killed By My Grace
by Saucery
Summary: A dark, fractured retelling of 'Sleeping Beauty', starring Derek Hale as the rescuer-turned-abductor, as the feral, carnivorous prince.


**KILLED BY MY GRACE**

* * *

He lifts the boy's hand. Traces its fingers. They're warm, light, insubstantial as mist. The boy's breath _is_ mist. Derek leans down to taste it, and then tastes the boy's skin, from throat to ear, jaw to clavicle. The ornate, lace-trimmed collar gets in the way; Derek sighs, pulls back, and unbuttons it.

He undresses the boy. Slowly.

Turns him in his sleep, so that his limbs, pearl-pale in the darkness, arrange themselves as Derek sees fit. His belly is petal-soft. His thighs even softer.

And still he does not wake.

He does not stir, though Derek murmurs to him; he does not speak, nor open his eyes. His lips part when Derek presses them open. His legs part when Derek bends them backwards.

And still he does not wake.

The crystal vial waits, filled with its precious antidote, on the bedside table. Derek has had the room cleared of the bric-a-brac the young prince had no doubt collected, during his waking life, all those years ago. The chandeliers overhead have been dusted. The sheets of old, moth-eaten silk have been replaced with fresh ones, and the prince's wardrobe replenished. Derek dresses and undresses the boy himself; no servants are permitted to touch him.

As Derek is touching him now.

He could awaken the prince, at any moment. It has been months, already, since he found the object of his quest - months since he was hailed as a hero. Certainly, the people have welcomed their brave new monarch with open arms, grateful to be justly governed again; certainly, the people have grieved as their former prince, despite all of Derek's best efforts, does not rouse.

_The curse has been too long upon him,_ they whisper, shaking their pitying heads, and Derek bows his head in return, in apparent sorrow, hiding the hunger that makes him salivate. (At the thought of visiting to the prince's bedchamber, tonight, and tasting him. Again.)

The antidote has not worked, he tells them, and they believe him, for he has saved them from the tyranny of Peter the Terrible, the last usurper, he of the blood-red eyes.

The antidote requires more work, Derek tells them, and they believe him, for he has wizards and witches of every stripe, looking for an antidote that _does_ work, that does wake the poor, sleeping prince, trapped in a slumber that does not let him grow, that does not let him age.

And if there are some wizards that question what Derek says, that question the fact that no vial, no antidote, ever seems to work… Well. They don't remain in Derek's employ for long. Or in life's employ, for that matter.

Derek ventures into the boy's chamber, night after night, and each time, finds a new way to enjoy him - to worship him, with his hands, with his tongue, as the pliant body curves up to his touch and flushes with heat and gives up its pleasure, time and again.

He tastes the boy's nape as he takes him. Pins his wrists, then kisses them. Holds him to himself, as if he were a child (he is); shushes him, and sings to him, as if he were afraid (he isn't). Sometimes, he bruises the boy in his eagerness; sometimes, he all but weeps with tenderness.

Each secret of that body is catalogued in Derek's mind, burned into his heart, given up to his hands. He bends and moves and animates those arms, bites those ankles, laves that throat. Loses himself in the hollow between those two shoulder-blades, boyish and pure as angel-wings, and finds himself again in the plush bounty of that mouth, hot and succulent as a sweetmeat, swollen as if bee-stung.

No one interrupts him, for he commands them not to.

He is… he is paying his respects.

To the fallen prince.

Derek knows that this cannot continue indefinitely. Eventually, he'll have to wake the boy; eventually, too many of his ministers will start discovering too many of the right answers.

But now, for _now_, oh, the boy is his. All his, in sleep, in the quiet, lambent light; all his, in perfect surrender, in an embrace that never ends (that never starts). Free of volition, the boy is everything, every kind of virtue, every kind of rapture; free of thought, the boy is _all_ things, every kind of beauty, every kind of bliss. He is a religion of silence, a sacred book, whose pages Derek turns with careful hands; his body is a cathedral, his stillness an altar, at which Derek prays, fervently, with a faith more complete than any pilgrim's devotion. The boy's eyes are windows of cut-glass, unseeing, when Derek opens them; his mouth is a chalice of sacramental wine, that Derek sips from with delicacy, with endless, harrowing thirst.

Derek trembles at the enormity of it, the pristine, ineffable _truth_ of it, and in it finds every secret of the universe. Every secret worth knowing, of line, of form, of containment, of release. Everything. Everything.

His quest had been to find the sleeping prince, and to wake him.

But Derek does not wish to wake him, at all.

* * *

**fin.**  
Please review!


End file.
